Tyson Foods created a tool to quantify the human impact of digital content on minority communities, starting with the Black community. The "Impact Index" leverages artificial intelligence to make domain-level decisions on news articles across thousands of publisher sites in real-time. This innovation empowered the brand to apply this data to its media plans, advise publishers of blind spots they may have on their sites, and encouraging advertisers to shift their media investment to pages and articles that have the best possible human impact on marginalized communities.
Objective
The U.S. public is consistently exposed to incendiary rhetoric and misinformation online, and a great deal of that is directed at the Black community. From dog whistles to unconscious bias, this has left the Black community vulnerable. Meanwhile, keyword block lists and exclusion lists, which lack nuance, have excluded tangible and factual news. For example, one publisher shared that content around George Floyd and Black Lives Matter was monetized at a 57 percent lower rate than other news content because of keyword blocking.
Advertisers fund billions of dollars in content every year ($263 billion in the U.S. alone), thus brands have a responsibility to address the toxicity online and its real, human impact on people. In short, brands need to be accountable for the content they run ads on and/or sponsor. In this environment, Tyson Foods, who previously pledged to invest more media dollars to support the Black community, wanted to develop a way to help advertisers and publishers better understand the human impact of content they sponsor and run ads on.
Target Audience
Since the ad industry funds billions of dollars in content with real ramifications for people, Tyson Foods saw an opportunity to hold digital media platforms accountable for running content that's harmful to the Black community. What's more, this initiative would enable publishers and advertisers to better connect with Black consumers.
Creative and Media Strategy
Tyson Foods developed the "Impact Index" — an AI-based tool to assess the human safety of digital media. The brand developed algorithms that examined articles at page-level and make decisions across publisher sites in real-time. The algorithms are trained, validated, and regularly audited by experts to identify detrimental or hateful content towards the Black community.
The Impact Index ranks individual news articles, based on their content, across thousands of publisher sites across four categories:
Through these classifications, Tyson Food's gained insights about what type of content to avoid running ads on. For example, the brand learned the most common form of bias is in local news, where some local news publishers often "boost the signal" of negative news pertaining to the Black community. Meanwhile, lifestyle sites boosted positive stories, but generally with little impact on the Black community. The brand then used this data to optimize its current media plans and inform future activations, allowing it to prioritize positive impact sites across campaigns.
Using this tool, Tyson Foods adjusted its investment and its media volume allocation towards positive impact sites by 20 percent. As a result, it doubled the amount of brand engagements compared to historical benchmarks.
